Posts Tagged ‘Talent’

Sarah Halzack, writing for The Washington Post, explores how LinkedIn is changing job-searching and recruiting:

As LinkedIn has exploded — perhaps because it has exploded — there has been a major shift in the way employers find new workers. Gone are the days of “post and pray,” a recruiter’s adage for the practice of advertising a job opening and then idly hoping that good candidates swim up to the bait.

Now the process of talent acquisition is something of a hunt.

“We’re really at a point now where all of your employees are vulnerable to being poached. Every single one,” said Josh Bersin, principal and founder of talent consulting firm Bersin by Deloitte.

The change is happening rapidly: A 2013 study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 77 percent of employers are using social networks to recruit, a sharp increase from the 56 percent who reported doing so in 2011. And among the recruiters using social tools, 94 percent said they are using LinkedIn.

Recruiter Chris Scalia told Halzack that the type of candidates he sees on LinkedIn is also changing. “LinkedIn was always known for where you would go to find that really critical, challenging hire,” Scalia said. “It was never really where you would go for a PC technician or something at the lower end of the career mobility scale. Now I see both. It is completely flooded.”

If you believe Olbermann's camp -- yes, that's an "if" worth thinking about -- the conflict came down to a simple issue: while Current was willing to pay its new anchorman $50 million, it wasn't willing to spend the money to bring his show up to a professional standard:

The sudden emergence of Jeremy Lin has led people to wonder about talent evaluation in the NBA. Two recent examples -- from Stephen Dubner in this forum and from Jonah Lehrer at Wired Science -- both take similar approaches. Both begin with the story of Lin, and then pivot to a discussion of the National Football League. In essence, each writer argues that talent evaluation in basketball and football is similar.

In my next two posts, I wish to address why I think talent evaluation in the NBA and the NFL is quite different.

Would love to see some commentary on the Jeremy Lin phenomenon in the NBA. Is this not a classic Moneyball-style "undervalued player"? Indeed, one of the best parts of the whole feel-good story (and there are many) is how consistently teams and coaches at the college and NBA level overlooked him before his breakout week. Even the Knicks were ready to release him a few days before his first big game against the Nets. Was he overlooked because he didn't "look the part"? Will this impact how scouts and coaches evaluate players? What is the current status of sabermetrics for basketball?

When my daughter Anna was 7, she told me she desperately wanted a dog. I looked her in the eye and said, "You can have a dog if you publish an article in an academic peer-reviewed journal." I wasn't kidding. I really, really didn't want a dog because I thought it would disrupt our family routine, which included large dollops of what Amy Chua's controversial new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, refers to as Tiger parenting.